The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Louis asks. ‘Why’ve you stopped?’

  ‘I thought you were going to teach me.’

  ‘How can I, when you’ve just put two marks on a page?’

  ‘You aren’t even looking.’

  ‘Well, what would you like me to teach you?’

  Iris looks at the easel, thickly textured with paint. ‘Can you teach me how to use oils?’

  ‘You should learn to crawl first—’

  Millais snorts. ‘That’s exactly what our old tutor used to say. Learn to crawl first! How you hated it, Louis. Don’t you remember how you railed against him? Louis Frost, a tutor cast from the same mould as old Perky. I never thought I’d see the day—’

  Louis stands, and brushes down his trousers. ‘Oh, very well. I’ll give you a lesson in oils, if just to quiet him. But I warn you, tomorrow you must return to sketching.’

  Millais nods at Iris and she smiles.

  ‘A look between conspirators,’ Louis says, and he sits beside her at the easel, squeezes an oil-paint bladder on to a porcelain palette. ‘Our trick is to prime the canvas with zinc white. We barely mix our colours, and use them quite transparently so that the white background gleams through. It makes it so much more vivid.’

  She glances at the colours before her – emerald green, ultramarine, madder and gamboge. It is like being handed a toffee pudding after months of gruel. ‘Here,’ Louis says, handing her a sable brush. ‘Practise with it.’

  Iris dips it in the crimson. ‘How?’

  ‘Anyhow you please.’

  ‘But what should I paint?’

  When she doesn’t move her hand, he adds gently, ‘Just make a mistake. See how it feels. Lord knows, I’ve put myself in the way of enough failures.’

  Iris grips the brush and scores it downwards in a single, triumphant streak. She dabs at the canvas again, making marks little better than a child would, but there is something boisterous and euphoric about it. She is allowed to make a mess. She sneaks small glances at Louis, at his dark curls that gleam auburn in the firelight. His finger, paler than the marble hand, is pointing at something on the canvas, and she should listen to him, but she doesn’t. She remembers how he held her wrist on that first day in the vaulted tea shop, and she brushes her palm against her cheek to feel the memory of it.

  The bell rings and Louis stands to answer it. He returns holding a crumpled letter.

  ‘Who was it?’ Millais asks.

  ‘Nothing of any import,’ Louis says, and he throws the paper into the fire. Iris watches its edges catch, the looping hand consumed by flame. Dear Iris, she remembers. We were most upset—

  ‘Will you paint another self-portrait?’ Louis asks.

  ‘My first painting will be of the marble hand.’

  ‘Ah, the stolen antiquity. Why?’

  It reminds her of the doll shop, of Albie’s plaster hand for pickpocketing, of a time that makes her chest constrict. But she doesn’t want to forget it either; the hand feels like a bridge between her two lives, though she just shrugs and says, ‘No particular reason.’

  Iris draws her brush across the canvas, and the colours leap and soar. The silence in the room is counterpane soft, just the sound of sable on cloth, of the spit and crackle of the fire. Louis yawns and stretches with the dexterity of a cat. The hail turns to rain. A belly growl of thunder. And they are safe inside, three painters. She remembers briefly the man who approached her yesterday afternoon and invited her to his shop – Elias? Cecil? – and she wonders what he was trying to sell her.

  She hears a whistle and a snort, and Millais is asleep. He lies back, his mouth open, his nose upwards like a pig’s. Louis and Iris start to laugh, silently, until they forget what amused them in the first place. She closes her eyes and thinks, I do not want this to end.

  If Iris were back at the doll shop, she would still be painting mouths and boots and fingernails, and the pale insides of her arms would ache from the pinches of Mrs Salter.

  Rose . . .

  No.

  In the corner of the room, the grandfather clock strikes half past four.

  Lion

  Silas tracks the ticking of the clock with his finger. In thirty minutes, at five o’clock, she will be here. He will be sitting in the armchair as he is now, next to the Lepidoptera cabinet, with an expression of rehearsed study and learning on his face. The door will click, and he will look up, adjust his pince-nez, and close and fold his copy of The Lancet as if interrupted. He has rearranged his posture twice, three times. He has slicked back his dark hair, buffed his pallor with soaps and oils. His nose, with its senatorial curve, is his favourite feature, and he has lit the candles rather than oil lamps as it looks best in shadowed light.

  ‘Iris,’ he will say, ‘what a pleasure. Indeed, I was so transported by The Lancet that I scarcely noticed the time.’ She will hold out her gloveless hand (the same poached pink as the salmon he has seen dandies eating in restaurants), and he will lock the door behind her to ensure that no customers disturb them.

  ‘Now you have my full attention,’ he will say, and she will laugh fondly, her eyes sparkling as she admires his treasures. She will pick up the lion’s skull – perhaps he will help her as it is heavy – and run her hands over the snagging texture of its cranium.

  ‘I had always thought that bones would feel so smooth,’ she will say. ‘I did not picture them this way. It is too ghastly for the likes of me.’

  She will giggle behind her hand, and tell him that she has a secret to impart. He will look troubled, say he hopes that she is well.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she will insist, before revealing that she pretended not to recognize him the day before just for a lark. ‘It did, I confess, pain me to witness your disappointment,’ she will say. ‘Could you not tell by the arch of my eyebrow that I was jesting?’

  ‘Most cruel friend,’ he will sigh, and then wag his finger at her.

  She will settle on the stool at his feet, and spear a pickled strawberry that he bought from the baker on the Strand. She will hover it in front of her mouth, the flesh red and wet, and then chew it slowly. Pushing the fruit into her cheek, she will beg him to tell her how he made the puppies’ skeleton (‘the butterfly bauble, now my most treasured possession. Such generosity I see in you, such a good soul. If only I had the talents to make something for you of equal worth!’) and he will glimpse the strawberry meat as she speaks. Her teeth will be as white as fired porcelain, as small as a cat’s.

  He contrives her history, decides that her parents were doting, but they perished when she was eight years old, and she and her maimed (though loving) sister were forced to rely on a benevolent aunt.

  She will confess she has also been lonely, in want of a friend. He will tell her that he has been unable to work since he last saw her, so immediate and intense was the bond of friendship between them. He will talk about his childhood, about the beatings and the smoke and the heat and the pain in his fingers and his neck, about how he wondered if he would ever escape it. And the sprawling, boundless loneliness; the children who despised him. He will tell her about Flick, how she went missing one morning after they went blackberrying, and how nobody found her. How he imagines her lying dead in a river, her red hair about her like the corpse of a fox, how he has always suspected it was her father who killed her, but of course she may not even have died, yet he just knows she did, though he cannot say why.

  The clock ticks on. Quarter to five. He should have asked her to come earlier. Then she would be here now. Each second chimes with the beating of Silas’s heart.

  Chck.

  Chck.

  Chck.

  He stands, stretches, and moves a candle from one side of the dresser to the other, assesses it, and then decides the original place was best. He studies himself in the mirror. Its frame is made of the fanned bones of tiny trout ribs, which Silas glued only a month before. He cannot imagine having the patience for it now, the steadiness of hand. His reflection is trembling very
slightly. He runs his fingers through his hair, then wipes the oil on his shirt.

  The clock has barely moved.

  Ten to.

  He watches the hand judder.

  Five to.

  He sits again, careful to place his knee in a way which makes him look severe yet approachable. Any moment now, she will breeze through the door.

  He picks up The Lancet again.

  ‘Sev-ere double tal-tali-talipes,’ he mutters, ‘resulting from long dis-use and fal-faul-ty pos-ittiron – position – of the feet; ten-o-t-omy and rup-ture—’

  The words swim, and he cannot make sense of them. He flings the journal to the floor, then checks she has not arrived, and gathers it back up, ironing the pages with his hands. He pretends to read. He can feel his pulse in his ears and in his throat.

  Five o’clock.

  She will be teasing him, making him wait a little. His body twitches with the effort of holding his stance, and he finds himself staring at the door. It is raining harder, sluicing the windows. Thunder snarls. She will be wet when she arrives, dripping. He will wring her out like a cloth.

  ‘What a storm!’ she will say. ‘But one worth battling to be here.’

  Five past.

  She will be sheltering from the rain, biding her time for a pause to run. ‘I could not arrive here sodden! Would you have a lady ruin her dress?’

  Ten past.

  The rain has stopped, but she will not want to dampen her shoes. She will be sidestepping puddles as if they are rabbit holes, secretly pleased that he is waiting.

  Quarter past.

  She had to stop on an urgent mission. A child fell off a pony, a kitten required rescuing from a high window. It will be something mildly heroic, enough that she retains her daintiness but which squares away her absence. She will be hurrying now, anxious that he is waiting.

  Half past.

  Something has befallen her. She has been knocked down by a cart. As she lies bleeding in the street, she sends an urgent message to him to come to her.

  He waits and waits and waits, as stagnant as a shadow.

  The clock strikes six, seven, eight o’clock, and still he does not move. He sits as if in a trance. She is coming. She will send a note. Perhaps she is dead. At the very least, she is playing a game to see how much he truly cares.

  It is dark and the hubbub of the Strand has passed away. And Silas knows, though he pretends he does not, that she is not coming, that no accident has befallen her. She did not recognize him yesterday, and she has forgotten today. It is no jest; she merely does not particularly care for him.

  He flexes his fingers, stands. He crosses the room to where the lion’s skull is balanced on the dresser (I had always thought that bones would feel so smooth – you fool, you imbecile – she is laughing like Gideon), and cradles it in his arms like a swaddled infant.

  He unlatches the door – the clicking sound he has been waiting to hear all day is a cruel taunt – and steps out, breathing hard. The edges of the buildings are thick with drifts of slush, the cobbles glossy with light reflected from the candle in his shop. He catches his face in a puddle, grotesquely distorted. He holds the skull above his head, and wavers for a moment, before heaving it on to the ground. It cracks into three: jaw, and the seam of the skull neatly halved. It is as easily broken as bone-dry clay.

  He picks up half of the cranium and presses the splintered edge against his neck. The pain is warm. He pushes harder, feeling the elastic give of his skin. His breathing steadies. It will not take much more pressure to pierce his throat.

  He hurls the segment on to the cobbles, and then lifts each fragment in turn and flings them downwards, again and again and again, until the lion’s skull is fractured into pieces no bigger than fingernails and he is panting, sweat rivering down his back.

  Bauble

  A loud crack wakes Iris. Her garret is cold, the fire long dead, and she puffs on her hands to warm them. She looks out of the window, at the white blanket of snow. New flakes are falling, rubbing out footprints and carriage churnings as efficiently as the swish of a broom. From her attic room, the world has shrunk to miniature. The horses tripping through the slush are as plump as sugared mice, and the costermongers look like wind-up tin toys. She sees a man splitting open kindling, his axe little bigger than a matchstick.

  ‘Honest folks is trying to sleep,’ a woman shouts from a house across the way.

  ‘Honest as this snow, with a dozen men’s dirty footsteps through it,’ the man bellows back, before raising his axe once more.

  She starts to dress, muscles stiff from standing endlessly, keen to see Louis and to continue her sketch of the hand. Over the last week, she has drawn it once a day, each picture an improvement on the one before it. In her haste, she knocks something off the shelf. She picks it up. It is a butterfly wing, pretty enough, trapped between two small circles of glass. She remembers the peculiar man and how he pressed it into her hand.

  When she is smoothing the sheets, she drops it again. This time, she doesn’t bother to retrieve it. It isn’t that she doesn’t like it, but it makes her uneasy – he must have given it to her as a sales ploy to convince her to visit his shop. It was something, at least, that he mistook her for the kind of lady who had tin to spare on such trinkets.

  It reminds her of her and Rose’s imaginary shop, Flora. Its blue awning and the galaxy of gas lamps. It would appear through the London fog like some sort of magical cave. Of course it was always a dream that would never happen, of course it was just a way of whiling away the hours, and of course they’d never have the ready money to escape the Doll Emporium. Iris wonders if, now she is earning more, she could put a little aside and give her sister the money for an establishment of her own – if Rose would accept it.

  Every day, Rose sews on and on and on, her chances narrowing with every stitch, as she pitches closer to becoming an old maid, a drain, a dependent. Iris will write soon, now that Rose has had a week to adjust to her absence. She walked to Regent Street yesterday evening and stood on the pavement opposite the shop for fifteen minutes or more. The candle was burning in her old garret.

  Iris shivers. It is not worth lighting a new fire; best to be out as quick as she can. Louis keeps his house as hot as an oven, and he rises early.

  But when she rings the bell, a girl in a tawdry pinny answers the door.

  ‘Is Mr Frost here?’ Iris asks as the charwoman curtseys.

  ‘Who should I say is calling, miss?’

  ‘Ir— Miss Whittle.’

  ‘A relative, miss? Shall I take your card?’

  ‘No. I’m his model and—’

  A sneer appears on the maid’s face. ‘Fetch him yourself,’ she says, and she bends over and tugs a cloud of laundry into a basket.

  Iris stares. For a maid, a charwoman, to snub her, to show her the same disgust she would to a bedbug – she sidles past the girl, who makes a sound like tchah, and takes the stairs to the studio. She keeps her back erect, her chin raised. She won’t tell Louis, won’t give the girl the satisfaction of seeing how well the blow landed.

  Louis bows briefly. ‘Ah! Queenie.’ He stands in front of his painting, amidst his clutter and treasures, rubbing his face. She imagines that it is her hand stroking his cheek.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘It’s no good,’ he says. ‘I can’t work. Why wasn’t I a clerk or a lawyer or any of those black-hatted professionals? Even an undertaker. Why did I choose to torture myself in this way?’

  ‘What on earth is wrong, dear princeling?’

  ‘It isn’t funny—’ Though he smiles. ‘I can’t get him right. Guigemar. It feels too idealized, too – I don’t know. Typical? What you said about the reality of painting – it struck me. I want it to be interesting, different. And it’s just a man kneeling at a woman’s feet and—’

  She stares at the figures in the little cell, one of Guigemar’s hands holding the unravelled knot of the Queen’s dress, the other kissing her knuckle.<
br />
  ‘Perhaps you should just paint the Queen. Without Guigemar.’

  ‘What?’ Louis says, and she realizes she has interrupted him. ‘But how would we know she is rescued?’

  ‘Why is it important?’ Iris says. ‘You can show suffering and hope, and the love she has in her desperation – isn’t that more interesting? And the dove –’ she points at it, flying past the window with its olive branch – ‘that symbolizes redemption and escape. Isn’t it too much to have that and Guigemar?’

  Louis frowns.

  ‘You could frame her differently – have her palm reaching for the bird? It could be her imprisoned by her jealous husband, after Guigemar has been cast out, before she breaks free by herself. Not the later rescue by Guigemar, when she’s held by King Mériaduc.’

  ‘I’d need to start again.’

  ‘You have time. And you wouldn’t – you’d just need to paint over where Guigemar kneels.’ She almost touches the canvas.

  Louis barks, ‘Stop! The paint is wet,’ and she retracts her hand. His expression starts to change.

  ‘I was hardly going to—’

  ‘Yes, I believe that’s it,’ he says. He stares at her. ‘You’re right. I could position a looking glass just behind her, which shows the viewer that the door of her jail is ajar. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed it.’ He pulls on a moth-eaten cape, and throws Iris’s cloak at her. She follows him downstairs. ‘Come, I can’t stay in this cell a moment longer. We will walk—’

  She laughs. ‘Have you gone quite mad?’

  ‘I believe I have. My malady is a grave one.’

  ‘Is there any hope of recovery?’

  ‘The apothecary assures me,’ he says, pulling her palm into the crook of his elbow as they step into the street, past the pinched face of the charwoman, ‘that the company of a kindly friend is my only chance.’

  She smiles. She enjoys the placement of her hand on his arm, and wonders at how quickly they have fallen into this easiness around each other. It is normal, respectable, for a woman to walk arm in arm with a gentleman. Has she not walked to church like this with her own father? She can feel nothing through her gloves except a faint pressure, the occasional brush of his trousers against her skirts.